


Cursed From the Earth

by hopelessbookgeek



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Grand Theft Auto Setting, Alternate Universe- GTA, F/M, Guilt, Michael's Heist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-31
Updated: 2015-07-31
Packaged: 2018-04-12 05:17:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4466822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopelessbookgeek/pseuds/hopelessbookgeek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was not unused to nightmares. The black dreams had haunted him since that night, and every strong breeze seemed to whisper betrayal, betrayal. Sometimes when storms howled against his windows he heard Ray’s dying screams. But there was a difference between nightmares and hallucinations.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cursed From the Earth

**Author's Note:**

> Well this might be the weirdest thing I've written in a while. It's an aftermath fic for Michael's Heist and all that implies, focusing on Michael's guilt coming back to haunt him at the end of his life. It reads kinda Mavin-y but that's not what I intended. I love Lindsay. Enjoy this... whatever it is.

Michael Jones wiped his glasses with arthritic fingers.

“Seventy-nine,” he said aloud to an empty room, his voice low and rumbling like distant thunder. He was used to spending birthdays alone now, but the first year he’d bought a cake for himself had been a sad one. Now he didn’t bother; his breath was too weak to blow out a candle and his stomach ached when he ate much of anything. He doubted he’d live to see eighty.

His apartment wasn’t big, but by the time he’d settled the glasses on the bridge of his nose and wrapped a robe around his aching body and shuffled to the kitchen, he was weary enough to have to sit down again. His breaths came wheezing, but since Jack had died six years back there wasn’t any money for doctors, and at times like this the old bullet wounds ached deep in his leg and ribs and gut. 

Times like this, when it was quiet and he was alone, the voices crept in, voices that sang with youth he could no longer remember, voices that cracked and stung and choked with blood and liquor, voices of old friends and older foes and the oldest of all, lost loves. Times like this the voices seemed so near it was like he could still see their owners standing before him, like they were there in his periphery just out of sight, a flash of blue eyes or black hair or–

The smell. There had never been a smell before, but it was there now, cigarette smoke and burnt rubber and spilt whiskey, blood and sweat and tears and a very particular, very acrid cologne. “Geoff,” he said, his own voice hoarse, and then he was there as if he’d always been there, not quite a spirit but not quite corporeal, the way he was on the last day.

“Michael,” the thing that couldn’t be Geoff said, and the voice was his but not his, the old familiar scratch but a tone he’d never had in life, like understanding.

“You’re dead,” Michael said, rather stupidly.

“Yeah I am.”

“So long ago…”

“Sure. Mind if I take a seat?” Without waiting for an answer, he lounged across the table from Michael, the sunlight coming in through the window shining slightly _through him_. Geoff would always be just shy of forty, now. “Sure you’re wondering why I’m here.”

“That did occur to me.”

“Here’s the thing, Michael-boy. When a man gets close to dyin’ the veil between the worlds gets thinner. You’re on what I believe they call _borrowed time_ , and so here I am. What worlds, I bet you’re askin’! Well, who knows. Can’t really tell you where I’ve been. Never planned on comin’ to see you, but well, I’m not the only one who’s comin’, so I figured I’d give you some warnin’.”

Michael’s mouth felt dry and he swallowed hard. “This some _Christmas Carol_ bullshit?”

Geoff laughed his raucous laugh, and the morning light shone through his bright eyes. “I missed you, kid. I trained you up so good. Really should have expected how things turned out, y’know? It’s only what I taught you to do. Nah, I don’t give a shit if you learn anything from this. Only a messenger boy. Don’t think everyone else is gonna be as a nice as me, sweetheart.”

Even as he said that, he started to fade around the edges, and Michael threw out an arm as if he would be able to touch Geoff, to grab him and hold him back, stop him from leaving. Michael’s crooked hand slipped right through Geoff’s forearm as if he were only air. “Just tell me you forgive me,” he croaked, and Geoff grinned.

“Don’t know about that one, Michael-boy. But hey, there are worse ways to die than with the smell of the sea all around me, eh?” He slipped away into nothingness before Michael had time to beg him to stay.

 _Borrowed time_ echoed in his ears, as did _veil between the worlds_. It only meant one thing, Geoff said. When a man is dying… That didn’t bother him as much as he thought it would. He’d spent most of his life flirting with death; he was ready. But was he ready for everything else?

He was not unused to nightmares. The black dreams had haunted him since that night, and every strong breeze seemed to whisper _betrayal, betrayal_. Sometimes when storms howled against his windows he heard Ray’s dying screams. But there was a difference between nightmares and hallucinations or visions or demons, or whatever it was he could call Geoff. How many of the others would show up? Would he see…?

He was shaken enough by Geoff’s appearance that he couldn’t quite bring himself to stand, but when he could manage it, he made himself a strong cup of coffee and downed it as fast as he could. The mug shook in his hands, because God, he’d never have the strength to see all the rest of them, would he?

He found out in about an hour. He was sitting in front of the TV, squinting behind glasses too weak for him anymore, when the door to his kitchen slammed shut abruptly and the air chilled ten degrees as surely as if he’d stuck his whole self into a fridge. He could smell the earth after rain, the fresh scent of lemonade, a friendly dog… and sea air, and blood, more blood, always the blood. “ _Michael_ ,” the boy hissed, almost too young to be properly called a man.

“Kerry,” Michael acknowledged. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? You weren’t sorry when the ash of a burning boat stained my skin, when gas splashed my fingers.” He thrust out his hands so that Michael could see, blackened with grime and soot– and, Michael noted with revulsion, flesh burnt beyond repair. In a few places the dead skin had sloughed off, and at least one fingertip was bare white bone. The coffee roiled in his stomach but he forced himself to look. _My legacy_ , he thought distantly. He had borne no children, amassed no fortune, left no mark upon the world. His history would be written in the abstract, blood-soaked language of memory.

Kerry had always been sweet, too sweet for everything that happened to him. He was never cut out for the life he was living, never meant for a life of ashes to dust. “You know I always thought you deserved better,” Michael said, and Kerry clenched his teeth.

“Better than choking to death on my own blood? Always thought that too. I always wanted to be like you, you know that? You were like my older brother, and none of you cared enough to prepare me for what I’d find on a heist! Have you ever felt salt water in third degree burns, or known what it’s like to drown and bleed out all at once?”

 _The son I never had despises me_. “I’m sorry now.” He hadn’t been sorry then, of course he hadn’t, his blood sang with the joy of it, and with Kerry’s cut he bought fine scotch and cocaine. He poured himself a finger of the scotch and almost spilled it on the ground in libation, but hesitated at the last second, unwilling to waste good liquor. He drank it instead.

The thing that might have been Kerry crossed his burnt and blackened arms. “You never even _buried_ me. You never told my mother what happened to me. Did you even know I still _had_ a mother? You never asked. I’ve seen her, you know. It took her fifteen years to admit I was even dead, and she cried over me every night until the day she died. You never visited her. You never called her. You never even _thought_ of her! You didn’t just end my life that day, Michael. You ended _hers_. I hope you suffer for that every day.”

Kerry disappeared in a flash and Michael shakily wiped at watering eyes. He hadn’t hated Kerry, hadn’t envied him the way he did Ray or fear him like Ryan. He hadn’t thought much about Kerry at all, really; he was a kid brother, a younger neighbor, someone Geoff knew was useful but wasn’t good for much after that. 

It wasn’t until the Crew had disbanded in flames that Michael, aching with withdrawal, remembered that Kerry was always awake early in the morning at the hour where no one is awake except the broken and the lovesick, and Kerry was neither but would sit on the roof in the _Mario_ t-shirt he’d worn for three days straight and watch the sun rise. It was Kerry who knew what kind of pancakes they all liked, and it was Kerry who always knew the worst jokes, and thus the ones most likely to make them laugh. Geoff had asked what they planned to spend their cut on; Ryan was saving for a faster ride, Ray wanted as many women as he could afford. For Michael it was something addictive, anything. Kerry had wanted to buy a dog.

It was two more hours of sickening silence before there was a crack like an illegal firework and the scent of gunpowder, and then Ryan was leaning against the window looking neater than he ever had in life, his hair neatly combed and curling under his ears, his greasepaint only a smudge under blue eyes. “Say what you will and then get out, damn you,” Michael said, shoulders sagging. “You’re all devils sent to torment me.”

“See, that’s interesting,” Ryan mused, his voice still the familiar bass rumble. “Hell is pain and Heaven is pleasure, isn’t it? But what if you’re a masochist? Wouldn’t that make Heaven Hell and Hell, Heaven?”

Michael dropped his head in his hands. “Just say it. Say whatever you want to say. Do you want me to apologize?”

“Nah, I’d never ask for that. Years ago, wasn’t it? Don’t get much of a sense of time out there, but you look pretty old. Listen, you know I’d have done the same thing, if I could’ve. I was planning on it, actually, not that heist but another one, just had to work out a few final details. Mazel Tov for getting there before I did. Did you spend my cut well?”

“Drugs,” he muttered.

“Ah, I could’ve guessed, you were pretty addicted back then. Well, never mind. How’s Lindsay?”

If there were any question Michael expected to get less than that one, he couldn’t think of it. “Lindsay?”

“You know, beautiful, redhead. Your fiancée last I heard.”

“She died almost twenty years ago.”

“Oh.” Ryan looked actually sad to hear it, his handsome face falling. “How?”

“Lung cancer. No money to treat it, not that we could have anyway, they said. Did– did you come to ask about _Lindsay_?”

“Sure. What, you think I ever gave a shit about _you_?” He laughed. “You never noticed, even after all those years?”

“Noticed _what_?”

Ryan glanced around the apartment, noting the disarray and disrepair with appropriate disinterest. “Always loved that girl of yours. Never thought you deserved her, if we’re being honest here. Hell of a girl, smart, kind, funny. Nah, you were definitely not good enough for her. Most beautiful woman I never had. Well, except for that one Christmas, eh?”

Michael had loved his wife for the twenty-plus years he’d known her. He’d missed her damn near every day he’d lived without her. He thought he knew her better than anyone, but even after twenty years, his heart throbbed for missing her and his blood ran cold thinking she’d kept secrets from him until the bitter end. “What Christmas?”

Ryan cocked his head, illuminated from behind like a portrait of a saint. “Must’ve been the Christmas before I died. You and her had some big fight Christmas Eve, you stormed out, didn’t come back til New Year’s?”

Christ. He remembered that. But Lindsay had fallen into his arms and forgave him a million times over, kissed him more times than he could count. Was that guilt? “You and her…?”

“Well, we’d always had a bit of a flirtation going on, I’m sure you noticed that. Hell, we knew each other before either of us met _you_. She’d kissed me once before, I think you were there for that one. We were pretty drunk.”

“You’re lying.”

“Am I?” Ryan cocked his head. “Maybe I am. Maybe not. Are the dead allowed to lie? Then again, maybe I’m not a vengeful spirit. Maybe I’m the last firings of your dying brain. Maybe that’s all we are, hallucinations. How about that? Anyway, no one deserves to be alone on Christmas, so I made sure she wasn’t. Always wished I’d had that chance again, but damn if she didn’t love you. But damn if I didn’t love her too, Michael. Anyway, I’m sure you’re busy suffering today, so I’ll take my leave. Just let me know– you treated her right? She didn’t have any regrets? She died happy?”

“Died laughing,” he whispered, and Ryan nodded.

“All I could hope for, I suppose. Well, you’ve had a hard day, and it’s only gonna get harder, isn’t it? I’m sure. Have a good death, Michael. Maybe I’ll see you again someday.” He seemed to melt into the sunbeams. Michael swallowed through a dry throat. Was he crazy? Was that all this was? Just fifty years of guilt swallowing him up in the end? So then that couldn’t have been true. Lindsay had loved him. She would never have betrayed him with Ryan… but he remembered that Christmas in a haze of drug-fueled rage, how _angry_ he’d been, how he’d threatened Geoff who tried to stop him leaving… The cocaine had made him an angry bastard, or maybe he was already one, and she was right to seek some comfort and love and gentleness on Christmas.

With a grunt of pain and the cracking of joints, he forced himself to his feet and found himself thinking of all the times he’d had to do that over his life. Did he miss when the aches were bullet wounds instead of arthritis, when he struggled to his feet after being thrown from a bike or with a hangover instead of just as a matter of course? He didn’t know. His life now was simpler, safer, quieter, but there was a part of him that knew he would never feel such a heady dose of adrenaline again as long as he lived, and there was something disappointing about that.

He shuffled back to his bedroom and pulled his photo album from the top drawer of his dresser. He didn’t have any pictures from the Crew days, thinking it was too dangerous to have photo evidence of his gang, so every picture in there was of Lindsay, or him and her together. He lingered over the wedding pictures, smiling slightly at his tuxedo t-shirt when he’d refused to buy a suit. He touched his wizened fingertips to Lindsay’s picture, her Polaroid smile, the way her wedding gown clung to her figure, the red of her hair that no amount of poor picture quality or aged fading could dominate.

“Pretty,” a voice said from beside him. Michael jumped, dropping the album to the floor, and looked over at the newest visitor. Ray sat on the bed, having never hit twenty-five, glasses still perched precariously on the bridge of his nose, brown eyes still wild.

“Lindsay or me?” he asked, a touch of jest in his voice. Ray had always been so easy to laugh with.

“Lindsay, Christ. You’re an old fuck.” They both laughed, but something in Michael shrunk up tight, wanted to cry. It had been so long since he’d laughed like that, a laugh wild and free and wide as the Texas sky. There was a beat of silence when it ended. “Why’d you do it, Michael?”

“Money.” No point in lying. “Money for a wedding, for a car and gas to put in it, for rent in a new city. Money for booze and drugs, mostly.”

“I had to watch Ryan die, you know. The cops got him first. He hardly made a sound, just went silent. Do you know how many shots they emptied into him? Dozens.” He paused. “I died screaming. I remember that. I couldn’t think straight, I just had to get to Ryan, I was yelling at him and the cops and God, probably, and… Dozens of shots into me, too. I knew, after they got Ryan, I knew it was you. I died hating you.”

“Do you hate me still?”

“I do and I don’t. It’s hard to nurse hatred for so many years. But still, Michael… we were family. You knew that. We all lived together. We patched each other up after jobs. I saved your ass more times than I could count, and you saved mine just as often. We hung out and played video games every night we weren’t working. You, me, and Gavin, like brothers. Didn’t you… care?”

“Not then,” he admitted. “Not for a while. Not until years later, when Gavin…”

“What happened to Gavin?”

Michael swallowed. “He wasn’t in on it at the time. Keep that in mind. Lindsay and I, it was all our idea. He didn’t know, and eventually he found out.”

“Where’s he now?”

“Six feet under. Swallowed the business end of his pistol.” Gavin’s death had hurt more than Lindsay’s, in a way. Lindsay had been in pain for a while, and she had died knowing Michael loved her fiercely, firmly. Gavin had been young, not even thirty, and he screamed at Michael for two hours before blowing his brains out in the bathroom. Michael had loved Lindsay more, but known Gavin longer and, in a way, more intimately. Michael kept walls up around him back then, and while Lindsay had a way of making those walls melt away, Gavin said _fuck it_ and scaled the walls to launch himself over them. He risked Michael’s rage on a daily basis, something Michael had never appreciated before.

“Oh. So you killed him, too.”

 _You killed him_. He’d always suspected. Ray confirming it didn’t help. “Guess I did. This my punishment?”

“Guess so. Not really up to me.” Ray flicked his eyes over to Michael and Michael remembered Ray when he first met him, a kid of barely sixteen, fine-featured but too thin. He was still thin and still fine-featured, and not that much older, and when Michael thought about his rheumy eyes and limp gray curls, he thought he might always envy Ray.

“I should go,” Ray said abruptly. “Someone else is trying to get through.”

“Maybe I can’t imagine more than one person giving me shit at once.” Michael rubbed his temple.

“Imagine?”

“Ryan said this might all be a hallucination.”

“Ryan’s a smart guy.” Ray rubbed the back of his neck. “I want to be angrier than I am, Michael. I want to be able to yell at you. But I’m just sad. I wanted to see you again, remember that I used to be a person who could walk this earth, that I used to eat cheeseburgers and bang hookers and see blue skies. You took all that away from me. We were a family and you took everything from me.”

 _And it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him_. Not that Michael was religious. But sometimes it was the only thing he had left. He had sinned, but the idea that some of his friends were in a better place was comforting. “I’m sorry, Ray.”

“Yeah? Is that what you tell yourself to feel better at night?” Before Michael could answer, Ray disappeared, and as soon as he had a new silhouette appeared, the someone else Ray had mentioned. Michael was getting exhausted with all these people. It wasn’t _Christmas Carol_ , Geoff had said, but he almost wished it were. Scrooge only had three ghosts and spaced them out over three nights. These spirits were only supposed to come when someone was dying, but maybe they’d killed him. _And now thou art cursed from the earth_ …

It took a minute for the silhouette to fully materialize, but Michael prepared himself for Gavin as he’d looked so long ago, Gavin with bloody throat and stone cold eyes, here to demand more tears as justice for a murder by proxy. But instead of gangly legs and sandy hair there was a soft faced lined with years and sickness, a body that was always soft but softer gone to seed, a thinning bun of hair that had faded slightly from red…

“ _Lindsay_ ,” Michael breathed. “Baby, you’re here…”

She turned her eyes on him, eyes that in life had been warm and brown. By the end they had dulled, and that’s how they appeared now. Ryan had come to him glowing, a vengeful angel in gold, but Lindsay looked as tired as she had when she died; she looked to be on the verge of dying again. He was so happy to see her that at first he didn’t process the words that came out of her mouth: “you son of a bitch”.

“W-what?” _Not her, not Lindsay, no, please_ …

“How dare you call me baby after what you did to me?”

“I didn’t! I never hurt you, Lindsay, you know I didn’t. Everything I did, I did for you!”

She glared at him. He ached to hold her again, to smell the sweet vanilla of her perfume, kiss her until he remembered that he was not fully worthless. “You convinced me it was a good idea. I killed my friends, Michael! You had me ready to explode a boat with them on it! You told me for years that it was just a matter of time until Geoff or Ryan killed us first, and that we were using the money well, and that Gavin was wrong and you did it because you love me.”

“I do love you, I always loved you, please, Lindsay…”

“If you loved me you wouldn’t have done that to me.” She folded her arms. “I suffer every day since I died. Every goddamn day, I’m forced to remember what you made me do. They find me, and ever since I died I’m just… I’d rather die again than have to suffer for this. And it’s because of you! It was all your idea. It’s my fault that Geoff is dead, and that Ryan is dead–”

 _Ryan_. Lindsay and Ryan. _We’d always had a bit of a flirtation going on_ , he’d said. “I saw Ryan earlier, he said that you and him… that Christmas I never came home…”

He hoped for anything that would show she didn’t know what he was talking about, or that she was sorry, or… But instead she looked at him as though she were seeing through him. “You screamed at me for hours. You were fun when you were high and then you’d come down and I waited for you to start yelling again. You called me a bitch, a whore, disgusting. You were gone for a week, you left me alone for Christmas, you loved cocaine more than you’d ever loved me. Ryan told me I was beautiful, and smart, and he made me laugh and was the same person in the morning as he was at night.”

“You married me… Didn’t you ever love me?”

“You quit for me. I loved you then. I loved who you were without the drugs. Or I thought I did, but I could never figure out which _you_ planned that heist.”

He couldn’t speak. He’d had twenty years to think Lindsay had died loving him, but now… had she ever? “And you were clean when Gavin died,” she continued, “so I think you’re just…”

“Just…?”

“Destructive,” she finished. “A menace. An abomination. You’re a magnet for horror, Michael. You always were. I thought it was the drugs, but it wasn’t. Maybe it’s a good thing you didn’t get sober for so long. I would never have stayed with you if I’d known what you were like sooner.”

His heart sank. He felt bile rose in his throat and considered how easy it would be to slip away and die just now, and no Devil could ever torture him worse than this, his wife whom he’d loved for so long telling him what a monster he was. “Lindsay… why didn’t you tell me? Why did you let me love you for so long without…?”

“I didn’t realize. I didn’t realize what a monstrous thing we did until I died, and I saw them, and I knew. You know Ray is frozen at an age younger than any son we might have had? He could be your grandson now, and he’ll never fall in love, and Kerry will never see his mother again, and Geoff’s daughter is grown and married and has a granddaughter of her own. We lived lives that none of them ever got to, because of us. Because you thought having a little more money was worth this!” She swung her arm at him and he flinched instinctually, but the arm went straight through his head.

“I– I’m sorry!”

“You’re not! You never were, you never were sorry until the day I died and I’ll bet you’re not now, you’re only sorry that they hate you, that I hate you. You weren’t even sorry when that disgusting secret killed Gavin.”

“I didn’t kill him!” he shouted. Truth and untruth and ambiguity tangled up in his heart like copper wire, and without warning one end or another would spark. He didn’t know what was real anymore. “Maybe it’s my fault he’s dead, just like it’s my fault that the rest of them are dead, but I didn’t pull the trigger! You can’t blame me for _that_ , at least.”

“It’s not up to me. See if _he_ blames you.” She started to fade away, and despite himself he cried out to stop her.

“You didn’t just come all that way to see me and call me a monster?”

She cocked her head and her mouth twisted with the ghost of a smile. “Didn’t I?” She disappeared before he could say anything else and for a moment all he could do was stare at the spot where she’d been, and when it hit him that he’d had the chance any widower dreams of and she’d told him it was his fault she was in Hell, well, he burst into tears.

It had been many, many years since last he cried. Running with the Crew he learned to suffer in silence, that tears were weakness. But here and now, he didn’t care, he was dying and it was his birthday and his wife hadn’t loved him and even one old friend showing up to shame him for events fifty years gone would be painful, but so many was too much. It was too much and he was crying and he didn’t care, and he thought he might not care if he died without ever seeing this side of seventy-nine but for the fact that death surely mean justice and he wasn’t sure he would withstand that particular type of retribution just now. Was there a statute of limitations on mortal sins?

He cried until his fragile body held no more tears to shed, he cried until he thought he might have to build an arc to escape, he cried until the day slipped away and he fell into a deep sleep. He dreamed of his wedding night, of counting the freckles on Lindsay’s smooth shoulders until she fell asleep in his arms. He dreamed of meeting Geoff and Gavin for the first time, when they bailed him out after a bar fight and picked the broken glass from his ribcage. He dreamed of the children he’d waited too long to have, a little girl with reddish curls and shy brown eyes, or a boy with a wide smile and kind hands.

And then he dreamed of salt and iron and screams, of the unheard last words of a boy bleeding into the ocean, of a pair of blue eyes closing for the last time knowing he has failed, of a cry to God or whoever is listening for mercy, mercy. He dreamed of a gold wedding band that only grew heavier with every year, of lines of sweet white danger spelling out temptation in the basest language imaginable, of carrying a shower curtain laden with brain matter to the dumpster at two in the morning when there was no one to ask questions. He dreamed of a world where everyone would be missed.

When he awoke, he rubbed his eyes and for once his hands weren’t cramping and gnarled. The skin was smooth and unlined again and he held it up in wonderment. Clear eyes focused on the figure kneeling beside him, brown seeking out green, and _yes_ , there, finally. “Gavin,” Michael murmured, and the boy broke into a grin. “Please. I’m sorry.”

“I know. I forgive you.”

“Please just– wait. What?”

Gavin fiddled with the hem of his shirt. “I wasn’t thinking when I… You did a terrible thing, Michael. You should have asked me. But you didn’t, and what does me tormenting you gonna change about that?”

Michael cocked his head. This wasn’t… “You’re not gonna berate me?”

“From what I’ve heard you suffered enough. I hated you for so long, Michael. I did. I blamed you, and maybe that was right of me, but… I don’t want to spend my afterlife being angry with you. I want to enjoy what there is here, wherever here is. I want to remember the beauty of being alive. And I want you to know, as someone beyond the veils between worlds, that I can’t give you a gift any better than forgiveness. You did it out of love.”

Michael looked down at his hands again. “Am I dead? I look young.”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“Whether or not you’re ready.”

“Ready?”

There was a new maturity to Gavin’s features; the cast of them was the same, the same big nose, the same half-smirk, the same light crackling in his eyes, but his expression, like Geoff’s so long ago, was one of understanding, knowing. “I know what you’ve seen. I know who’s visited you and what they told you. You know you’re dying. So, if you’re ready, you can move on.”

“To where?”

“Wherever you deserve. But the great myth about Hell is that it’s permanent. If you serve time, you serve it, and then you leave. You never forget anything– maybe that’s what makes it permanent. But someday, Heaven’s waiting.” He hopped to his feet and held out a hand and Michael hesitated.

“You know that Ryan told me I might be hallucinating all of this. That I’m dying and so my guilt is manifesting itself into… whatever is happening here.”

Gavin shrugged. “Maybe that’s true. What do I know? Maybe you’ll die peacefully in your sleep and your consciousness won’t go anywhere and religion is a lie. Or maybe this is real. Or maybe it isn’t. Why not give it a chance? Why not think about going somewhere where you won’t need your glasses, and where, eventually, they’ll all forgive you?”

It was tempting. However long he’d have to suffer in Hell, Heaven would wait. Of course, he’d never forget. But since when had forgetting been an option? He stood and shakily returned Gavin’s smile.

Michael Jones took off his glasses with youthful hands.


End file.
